To perform scientific, collaborative experimentation and exploration over any significantly large geographic or spatial domain, deploy a large number of field devices to provide sufficient resolution, or track a moving or dynamic phenomenon, or in cases where phenomena to be assessed are in remote areas and/or are rapidly changing, it is difficult and potentially infeasible using conventional methods. If feasible, the methods are prone to unreliable performance and overwhelming complexity.
Achieving a practical level of assurance that the scientific experimentation and exploration will be reliably achieved can be a complex, time-consuming, and expensive undertaking. Certain location like Antarctica, oceans, wetlands, deserts, rain forests, low-earth orbit, and hazardous areas can present their own unique challenges. The study of geographically widespread phenomena (e.g. climate change) presents the additional challenge of scalability to many conventional approaches. Further, certain circumstances, such as those involving data sensing and gathering in fragile ecosystems and wildlife habitats, are sensitive to human presence. Consequently, these environments require remote, economical, and widely scalable orchestrated control over experimentation and exploration, ensuring that the human footprint on the habitat can be minimized while achieving scalable resolution or the desired fault-tolerant redundancy.
Some experiments and explorations require numerous deployed sensing devices that are portable or mobile (or even self-mobile), providing sufficient resolution and the ability to track a moving, changing, and geographically widespread phenomena. The user may wish to change some parameter in on section of the geographic area while concurrently checking the change's effect in another section. Further, the user may want flexible and dynamic control over the functions and movement of field-deployed devices (e.g., to focus the location of field devices for higher spatial resolution in one small area), and, if those devices work in conjunction with a satellite, the user may also desire dynamic control over the functions, movement, and orientation of the satellite to enhance the degree of control in the experiment or exploration. Moreover, the user may wish to do on-orbit experiments or experiments that require a collaboration of satellite functions, movement, and orientation in conjunction with controlled function, movement, and orientation of each participating field-deployed device, synchronized for collaboration with the satellite functions, to conduct certain orchestrated and choreographed experiments in an interactive manner. These collaborative, orchestrated experiments offer new possibilities to science.
Military environments present their own unique challenges. The military theater often presents both a remote and hazardous environment, where information from the theater of battle and command and control over action taken in the battle theater is often complex and rapidly changing. Military decisions depend upon current, accurate information and must be quickly and decisively made. Higher quality and quantity of intelligence from the battle theater, including greater resolution and degree of coordination and control over the actions taken in the battle theater, are desirable.
First responders also have a need for high quality intelligence and information. Search and rescue during or after hazards or disasters present dangers to human first responders and others conducting search and rescue. Poor or inadequate information from or about the rescue area, a portion or all of which may be remote or effectively remote due to hazards, can contribute to loss of life or damage the environment or property. Further compounding the situation is that the normal communications systems, utilities and information-gathering services may be unavailable after a disaster, which may be widespread or in remote areas (e.g. an oil spill or fire in the Alaskan wilderness). These situations lend themselves to solutions providing remote orchestrated control over information and intelligence gathering, potentially over a widespread remote location, along with a greater degree of orchestrated command and control that is sufficiently robust in the face of the difficult environment.
In the transportation and homeland security arenas, sensing and monitoring factors affecting land, sea, air, and orbital traffic, and effecting adequate system and signaling control over transportation under both normal and hazardous conditions is a daunting challenge. Many locations do not have terrestrial transportation monitoring and control infrastructure in place, as it is expensive and requires years of planning. Compounding this is the reality that many areas where important transportation takes place are or can be remote (e.g. boats, ships or oil tankers out at sea, or transoceanic flights or automobiles traveling on remote highways or unmapped roads). In the case of agriculture, more efficient ways of monitoring and controlling agriculture to increase the productivity of limited land resources in the face of ever-increasing populations are needed.
Traditional satellites, costing millions of dollars, do not offer the desired degree of control over their functions (communications, instrumentation, and actuation-control), and their quantities are too small to offer the tremendous access needed by large populations of experimenters or those seeking to flexibly gather data through large arrays of sensors. While conventional satellites and ground stations are fine as a communications medium for high volumes of phone calls, data, and for other widespread instrumentation systems that are already operational, they cannot be easily or economically coopted for large volumes of coordinated research and development or complex scientific experiment.
Traditional ground stations have fundamental barriers which limit access to their use in Low Earth Orbiting Satellites (“LEOSAT”) based experimentation. First, traditional ground stations using powerful computer servers, sophisticated multiband radios, and high-gain directional tracking antennas can cost thousands of dollars and are generally stationary. Second, traditional ground stations require significant knowledge to use and are hence not very transparent or easily or quickly deployed by students, experimenters, or untrained personnel. Third, traditional ground stations are few in number and are not easily deployed in large numbers on large geographic scales. Fourth, students and educators may not be familiar with ground stations. Fifth, the Short Temporal Window Problem with the Traditional Ground Station Approach exists and is known in the art. Finally, the requirement to have a ground station in order to participate in LEOSAT and/or cube-satellite based experimentation or operations is in itself a limitation.
Low Earth-Orbiting Satellites (LEOSATs), such as Cube-satellites, wherein one-unit cube-satellite may measure 10 cm×10 cm×10 cm, and weigh no more than 1.3 kg, are interesting to NASA, scientists, and amateur experimenters since they represent a very economical, volunteer enthusiast way of doing on-orbit experimentation, relative to commercial or government provided satellites for doing science and experimentation. Cube-satellites, because of their economy and small size, could easily be deployed in large numbers utilizing only a fraction of the launches and an even smaller fraction of the budget of more conventional satellite approaches. Further, the time from experimental concept to on orbit implementation tends to be much shorter in Cube-satellites than the conventional large-satellite approach to doing on-orbit science and experimentation. This being the case, it is nevertheless challenging to incorporate many of the functions and the functional performance of traditional satellites into the small inexpensive cube-satellite design. Certain functions (e.g. providing power for onboard systems, propulsion, stabilization, and orientation of the satellites while in orbit, and high performance and directional communications) are now fairly routine in traditional satellites, but become difficult to achieve in the economical cube-satellite approach. Cube-satellite performance is generally substandard as compared to conventional commercial and scientific satellites.
A salient difficulty in cube-satellites is the ability to achieve precise on-orbit stabilization and orientation (i.e. attitude control and hence control of its radio pattern direction). In any satellite, communications, computation, stabilization, the ability to orient the satellite, and the sophistication of the ground station are all interrelated. For example, the communications performance between ground station and satellite depends upon the ability to stabilize and orient the satellite so as to provide directional antenna aiming and gain directed at the ground station. But this precise orientation in cube-satellites is relatively difficult to achieve. This makes cube-satellite communications using the higher-gain dipoles or directional antennas particularly hard to achieve. In essence, it becomes hard to keep the cube-satellite antenna's major radio lobes pointed in the direction of the ground station. This is made all the more difficult as satellites are normally required to spin for thermal equalization on all surfaces. A particularly challenging problem is that the cube-satellite may spin somewhat erratically or tumble about at several RPMs once deployed. This means the satellite antenna's radio patter goes into and out of alignment with the ground station, causing deep period nulls in the radio strength, and radio alignment with the ground stations lasting for mere seconds in some cases. The deep nulls may interrupt the radio link between cube-satellite and a given ground station, and any portion of any messages in communication may be lost or the message may be dropped entirely.
Another issue limiting access to satellite-based experimentation using cube-satellite(s) and LEOSATs in general is the short temporal communications window, i.e. the short window of time available for communicating with the satellite during its flyover from the perspective of a given single ground station. This window, even under the best of circumstances, (i.e. under a good consistent signal for the entire window) is at most about 15 minutes as the LEOSAT or cube-satellite comes up over its approaching horizon, flies overhead and then goes down below its departing horizon. Hence, using the traditional single ground station approach to LEOSAT and/or cube-satellite communications limits access to on-orbit experimentation in the case of LEOSATs and/or cube-satellites. The herein disclosed solution is to incorporate a plurality of inexpensive ground stations that can be portable or even mobile, and to network these ground stations together, synchronizing them with respect to when each ground station listens and when each ground station can speak. Scaling a network of this type globally or to any significant extent solves the small temporal window issue, since communications with the satellite is conducted through the collaborative action of many ground stations as opposed to just one or a few. In this scenario, communications can be broken up into short messages communicated through various ground stations to be recomposed centrally thus extending communications between ground and LEOSAT.
Further, Traditional ground stations designed for communicating with LEOSATs or cube-satellites normally include relatively expensive computer servers and relatively expensive, high-gain directional tracking antennas so as to attempt to maintain the communications link between ground and satellite during the satellite's 15 minute orbital overhead pass. They may cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars, are generally stationary, and require housing facilities. They are not readily scalable to large numbers of units, limiting broader access to low-end LEOSAT or cube-satellite communications or satellite-based experimentation.
What is presently unavailable in the art, which the disclosure herein provides includes the following thirteen features and benefits: (1) ability to broadly deploy sat-based operations (terrestrial, on orbit, or in combination) to very large geographic scales and to be capable of dynamically controlling this scale; (2) ability to substantially ramp up with respect to access time in sat-based terrestrial, on-orbit, or combined operations and to be capable of dynamically controlling that scale; (3) ability to substantially ramp up and scale in numbers of ground stations from just a few to many thousands of ground stations, and to be capable of quickly and economically field deploying these inexpensive ground stations; (4) ability to utilize a number of small, geographically dispersed, highly economical ground stations so as to achieve the performance of a single high-end or powerful ground station; (5) ability to support portable, mobile and self-mobile ground stations and to be able to remotely adjust ground station position, orientation, and ground station antenna orientation on these portable, mobile, and self-mobile ground stations; (6) ability to equip these portable, mobile, and self-mobile ground stations with sensors, instrumentation, and actuation (arms, motors, probes, mobile directional antennas, etc.) for use in experimentation, instrumentation, or operations endeavors; (7) ability to network the (scalable to thousands) plurality of these geographically distributed ground stations together, so commands can be sent to them from a centralized point, like a computational cloud, and so that data or satellite communications collected by the ground stations can be routed back to the central computational cloud, for access there by computer or smartphone for example, and for forwarded to any other ground station making up the plurality of ground stations; (8) ability to transparently and automatically support thousands of novel collaborative, orchestrated, and interactive, large-scale, terrestrial, on-orbit, or combined widely distributed stationary, portable, mobile or self-mobile experiments, explorations, and/or operations at an economical cost, while having the ability at the same time to quickly deploy same; (9) ability to utilize programming in the computational cloud and in the ground stations and satellite(s), in order to adjust and tune interactively, system communications, instrumentation, and command and control actuation among the cloud, the plurality of ground stations, and the LEOSAT(s) and/or cube-satellite(s); (10) ability to overcome the cube-satellite and LEOSAT stabilization and short temporal window limitations on communications and to achieve a practical level of packet data communications between the plurality of stationary, portable, mobile, and/or self-mobile ground stations and the satellite(s) making up the system through automatic, coordinated, and orchestrated communications control made possible by the interaction of communications, instrumentation, control actuation, and location and orientation functions among the plurality of ground stations and the LEOSAT/cube-satellite; (11) ability to use a smartphone with Internet access to automatically control a collaborative experiment, instrumentation function, or exploration or other operation anywhere on the Earth's surface and/or on orbit; (12) ability to combine and smartphone and inexpensive AXSEM radio board, and small antenna to form a highly economical base station; and (13) ability to achieve all of this economically while broadly expanding access. Accordingly, an economical, practical solution is desired, not only for reducing costs and capital expenses of providing such novel Collaborative Integrated Services (CISs), but also for improving the performance of certain communications, instrumentation, and/or actuation services already marginally available in the context of LEOSAT and/or cube-satellite-based communications, experimentation, exploration, and operations.